Democrats: Too smart for their own good?

Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono thinks she’s figured out why Democrats have such a hard time connecting with voters: they’re just not emotional enough.

That’s right — in Hirono’s assessment, the party that spawns unruly mobs demanding that we “believe the victim” without evidence, blames poverty on successful businesses, and envisions immigration policy as a form of national charity for third-world countries is just too darn cerebral for many voters.

According to Hirono, Democrats “know so much” that they “have to tell everyone how smart we are.”

It’s certainly easy to see why people would be turned off by political candidates who go around smugly condescending to the voters they clearly view as their intellectual inferiors. According to a recent study, liberals are particularly patronizing toward minorities, “dumbing themselves down” by using simpler language when interacting with racial minorities, especially black people.

But just because Democrats are conceited doesn’t mean they’re “smart,” and it hardly suggests that they suffer from a lack of emotion. They don’t call them “bleeding heart” liberals for nothing, after all.

On seemingly every political issue that comes up for debate, Democrats stake out a position based first and foremost on emotion — usually in the form of sympathy or empathy — and only later come up with flimsy academic arguments to retroactively justify their knee-jerk policy prescriptions.

Every time there is a mass shooting, for instance, the Democrats loudly squawk about the need to ban guns, a childishly simplistic approach that says more about liberals’ irrational fear of firearms than it does about their ability to formulate feasible policy solutions.

They’re similarly clueless about tax policy, which for Democrats is just an excuse to exploit economic jealousies. Bernie Sanders never did manage to explain to his supporters exactly how those evil “billionayahs” have been keeping everyone else poor, but he sure made it clear how much he despises those who produce goods and services that people want to buy.

Democrats aren’t any better when it comes to immigration policy, which they seem to view as an economic relief program for the world’s poor, rather than a crucial element of America’s economic and national security.

As thousands of Central American migrants marched toward our southern border with the intention of entering the country illegally, the Democrats’ core argument against President Trump’s enforcement of immigration law boiled down to sob stories about women and children trying to escape poverty, as though concern for their plight was the only relevant consideration.

It’s a good thing we have a President who’s smart enough to realize that those women and children provided a perfect cover for criminals looking to tag along and blend in with the caravan, a notion Democrat leaders chose to overlook.

Senator Hirono won’t let reality get in the way of her self-satisfied assessment, though. She even presented her thesis as though appealing to voters emotionally hasn’t been the foundation of the Democrat Party’s politics since the New Deal.

“I’ve been saying it at all our Senate Democratic retreats we need to speak to the heart, not in a manipulative way, not in a way that brings forth everybody’s fears and resentments, but truly to speak to the heart so that people know that we’re actually on their side,” Hirono proudly informed attendees at the far-left “Bend Towards Justice” conference.

Herein lies the problem for the Democrats: they pity and condescend to the American electorate. Voters are actually the smart ones. Hopefully Hirono will keep claiming a higher intellectual stature, and voters will use both their smarts and their hearts to downgrade the Democrats’ status.

Harlan Hill is a political advisor, media commentator, and an advisory board member of the Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.